Stephen Curry as Best Player? Sure. Most Valuable? Maybe Not.

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Stephen Curry, center, was named the N.B.A.'s most valuable player on Monday, but James Harden, left, and Chris Paul might have been more valuable to their teams.CreditDavid Phillip/Associated Press; Maddie Meyer/Getty Images; Darren Abate/Associated Press

Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors was the best player on basketball’s best team. Yet he might not have been deserving of the Most Valuable Player Award he easily won. The key is the phrase “most valuable.”

In most of the major sports, the M.V.P. has morphed into a “best player” trophy, but if the original intent to honor the player most valuable to his team is kept, there is a case to be made that Curry should have finished behind a few other players.

Using Basketball-Reference’s win share statistic, which tries to determine how many wins a player contributed to his team, Curry was worth 15.7 this season, third in the N.B.A. behind James Harden (16.4) and Chris Paul (16.1) and just ahead of Anthony Davis (14).

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Without Anthony Davis, the New Orleans Pelicans would almost certainly have missed the playoffs.CreditMarcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

But imagine a world in which Curry did not exist. Curry’s team won 67 games with him, so if the win share statistic holds true, it would have won around 51.3 games without him, which would still make it a playoff team in the competitive Western Conference.

That makes sense, as the Warriors were a deep, well-coached team that also featured another sharpshooting All-Star guard, Klay Thompson, and the player who garnered the most first-place votes for defensive player of the year, Draymond Green. Without Curry the team could also have reasonably expected more from Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston.

Compare that to the Houston Rockets, a team that won 56 games, good enough for the No. 2 seed in the conference. If you remove Harden’s win shares, it would lower Houston to 39.6 wins and drop it from playoff contention. Houston lost Chandler Parsons to free agency and played much of the season without Dwight Howard, so Harden had to carry a disproportionate load.

Twenty-five voters thought Harden was the M.V.P., but that put him well short of Curry, who had 100 of 130 first-place votes.

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The Rockets’ James Harden, passing against the Clippers on Monday, was the M.V.P. runner-up but had the N.B.A.’s highest win-share total.CreditDavid J. Phillip/Associated Press

Harden’s value to his team and Paul’s to the Los Angeles Clippers, while huge, were nothing compared with how valuable Davis was to the New Orleans Pelicans. He led the N.B.A. in player efficiency rating and established himself as a two-way force, making the case that he is becoming the league’s best player. If you were to remove his win shares from the Pelicans’ 45-37 record, which just barely got them the No. 8 seed, it would take the team down to 31 wins and another trip to the lottery.

Despite that, Davis did not receive a single first-place vote and finished fifth in the voting behind Curry, Harden, LeBron James and Russell Westbrook.

While James had a case for executive of the year after engineering the rebuilding process in Cleveland, the player who finished just below him in the voting was a better M.V.P. candidate. Asked to carry the Oklahoma City Thunder for much of the season without the injured Kevin Durant, Westbrook responded by morphing into the closest thing the league has ever seen to Michael J. Fox’s “Teen Wolf.” He scored, rebounded and passed with a ferocity no player has in recent years and had 11 triple-doubles to show for it. At 10.7 win shares, Westbrook was well off the league leaders, but without him the 45-win Thunder would have won an estimated 34.3 games, and for those who watched him dominate, that may be a rather conservative estimate.

No advanced statistic is perfect, and basketball is a team sport. But win shares is one of the best efforts to date to get in the range of a player’s value. While it supports the notion that Curry was one of the league’s three or four best players — and few would argue he was not the league’s most fun player to watch — it seems the voters may have once again ignored the word “valuable” in the award’s name. Harden or Davis may have been robbed of what was rightfully theirs.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B12 of the New York edition with the headline: Best Player? Definitely. M.V.P.? Maybe Not. . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe